The Art & Science of Creating Good Videos

Vietnamese get most of their information from online sources, including social media, primarily Facebook. They also watch a lot of video, 2 hours, 43 minutes a day, to be precise, according to the results of the annual We Are Social and Hootsuite update. As a result, YouTube ranks 4th among all websites in Viet Nam, according to SimilarWeb. It is for this reason that videos should be an integral part of any digital marketing campaign.

I see a lot of online videos intended to promote various educational institutions but not very many quality ones that young people, i.e., potential international students, would actually watch. In all honesty, most fall into the bad and ugly categories. Here are two examples. It would be best to illustrate my points by showing you real videos but that’s not possible, for obvious reasons, the most important of which I would not want to embarrass the offending parties.

Low quality content: A lot of videos I see are of the talking head variety. Either students are sitting or standing in one location talking about their school and related experiences, or someone is interviewing them using a talk show format.

In one video, the students being interviewed looked like prisoners, sitting with hands folder, and dutifully answering question after question. In another, a student was obviously reading off of a script and looking into the camera with the occasional nervous smile. Not convincing, invariably boring and, sometimes, painful, to watch.

Vietnamese students will click on the link, watch for a second or two, and then quickly move elsewhere in search of more inspirational, educational, and/or meaningful content.

Poor sound quality: Content aside, many videos are not professional or even semi-professional. Either staff or students are using substandard equipment and do not have experience making videos for the demographic in question. It’s like with photography. Everyone with a smartphone is a “photographer” but very few know how to take good photos worth looking at.

Nas Daily is an example from Facebook that I often share with colleagues. His daily one-minute videos are crisp, fast-paced, and a pleasure to watch and listen to with commentary, interviews, and background music. He has over 5.8 million followers and over a billion views, which means he must be doing something right. The point is his videos are worth watching.